September 12, 2011

SIDE-BY-SIDE:

Obama the Silent Tax Cutter: You wouldn't know it, but he's cut taxes more than George W. Bush did in his first term. But Obama doesn't get credit because he hasn't cut income taxes as broadly as Bush and Reagan did (Eleanor Clift, 9/12/11, Daily Beast)

Obama has invested so much time demonizing the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich that he has obscured the true narrative of his presidency. Class-war rhetoric aside, Obama is one of the most prolific tax cutters in recent history, with a record that puts him squarely alongside that of George W. Bush.

Crunching the numbers at the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress, analyst Michael Linden found that if one compares the cost of tax cuts in just the first four years of Bush's term (2001-04) to the first four years of Obama's (2009-12), Obama's tax cuts are bigger. The value of the Bush tax cuts were about $475 billion in those first four years, or about 1.1 percent of GDP. Obama's total about $1 trillion, or 1.6 percent of GDP.